I’m not a funny guy.
Steven Spielberg
IN AUGUST 1977, Cliff Robertson, who had never ceased to resent David Begelman’s treachery over I Shot Down the Red Baron, I Think, discovered that the same man, now head of Columbia, had forged his endorsement on a $10,000 cheque and used the money to buy travellers’ cheques for a holiday trip. Robertson promptly reported the forgery, and, in one of the most astonishing of all Hollywood scandals, brought to light misappropriations totalling $61,000. The industry was astounded, less at the act of stealing than at the relatively picayune sums involved, Begelman earned $300,000 a year and lived rent-free in a $5000-a-month mansion. Other falsifications, even more brazen, soon came to light. These included a statement by Yale, from whose Law School Begelman always claimed to have graduated, that it had no record of him ever attending the university.
Such was Begelman’s popularity in the industry, however, that most people gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming a financial crisis brought on by his gambling or, more likely, a mental breakdown driven by the urge to destruction that he acknowledged as a fundamental flaw in his character. He continued to manage Columbia even as his arraignment approached, though increasingly Dan Melnick assumed the day-to-day running of the studio. If anyone deserved censure, the industry perversely decreed, it was Robertson, for his disloyalty to the system in going public. After his conviction and a period of therapy, Begelman resumed a seat of power; Robertson was almost universally excoriated for having failed to be a good sport.
Spielberg sided with Begelman. Like everyone else in Hollywood, he accepted corporate larceny as a fact of life. ‘Here the studios have all kinds of ways to prove that they have actually made no profit,’ he shrugged, ‘so why should we be cut in on anything?’ If there was a lesson, it was this: be quicker than the other man, better counselled, better prepared.
Julia Phillips was also punished for getting on the wrong side of the establishment For months she battled Columbia for control of promotion and release on the film she’d done so much to realise, until, exasperated by her complaints and increasing reliance on freebase cocaine, Begelman in late summer barred her from the lot. Her husband Michael reappeared from his voyage of self-discovery to take over the reins. Now it was Julia’s turn to go to Hawaii and sit on Sunset Beach, blearily watching John Milius riding waves to try and forget about the massive public rejection of Big Wednesday.
Spielberg’s agreement with Dennis Hoffman to direct a feature within ten years of their 1968 Amblin’ contract also returned to haunt him. According to depositions sworn by Hoffman in 1995, Spielberg responded by revealing his true age, and assuring Hoffman that he had been a minor when he made the deal, which was therefore invalid. Hoffman agreed to accept $30,000, he said, and the contract was torn up. Later, Spielberg agreed to buy 20 per cent of Hoffman’s Designer Donuts company.
Begelman, Melnick and their lieutenants didn’t know what to expect of Close Encounters, since Spielberg edited not at Columbia but secretly and under guard, in a rented apartment in Marina del Rey close to Doug Trumbull’s headquarters. After the first screening of the rough cut, however, they were elated. Bob Cort, the young vice president in charge of advertising, ‘leaped in the air like a giddy child,’ wrote Peter McClintic, ‘whooping and giggling and pounding Spielberg and Trumbull like players who had just won the seventh game of the World Series’.
Alan Hirschfield, chairman of the Columbia board, was particularly moved by the use of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ in the finale. Spielberg wasn’t so sure about it. Preparing the film for the first sneak previews, on 19 and 20 October, at the Medallion in Dallas, he vacillated between three possible musical endings: Cliff Edwards’s original from Pinocchio, an orchestral version of the song, or an optimistic coda by Williams. Hirschfield insisted he use Edwards for at least the preview, and it was this that closed the Dallas screenings. But some of the 1400 audience sniggered at Edwards’s reedy tenor, so Williams’s piece replaced it. Responding to criticisms of the film’s length, Spielberg also cut seven minutes after the previews, though it still ran over two hours, an irritant to exhibitors, who could squeeze in five shows a day only by starting the last at 10 p.m.
His editing delayed the release by some weeks, which dislocated Columbia’s elaborate promotion plans. Journalist Bill Warren recalls:
I was invited down to this colossal press event at the Bonaventure – twice… It was a particularly plush function. Not just loads of food, but free pocket tape recorders to interview everyone in sight… All the press materials, including the tape recorders, had been prepared for the cancelled press conference the month before… so most of the batteries were dead.
The majority of preview-goers loved the film, but a disappointed Hirschfield told friends that it was ‘no Jaws or Star Wars’. Journalist William Flanagan, who wrote on personal finance for New York magazine, agreed. On Monday 31 October he told readers, ‘In my humble opinion, the picture will be a colossal flop. It lacks the dazzle, charm, wit, imagination and broad audience appeal of Star Wars – the film Wall Street insists it measure up to.’ These attacks, resonating with the Begelman scandal, dismayed investors. Columbia shares, which had soared from $7 to $18 in expectation of a hit, slumped to $15, and by Tuesday the flood of ‘Sell’ orders forced the New York Exchange to suspend trading in the stock. On Wednesday, in some desperate damage control, Time, a loyal investor, published a rave by its film critic Frank Rich, who’d bluffed his way into the Dallas screening by convincing a ticket-holder that Close Encounters was a Disney wildlife documentary. The rot in Columbia shares stopped at $16 while the market waited for the 15 November opening.
But the gala preview at the Ziegfeld on 44th Street for the Cancer Research Institute was a spectacular success. Reviews were no less rhapsodic, and within hours, though snow fell that day in New York, people were queuing round the block to see the film. Its folksy sentiments, suburban setting, crystal-chandelier spaceship, even its feelgood aliens beguiled the most cynical audience. Spielberg’s genius, not only as a cinema poet but as a technician, a marshal of cinematic forces, a market strategist, a cultural historian, was spectacularly on show.
And yet, if Jaws established Spielberg as a force in the industry, Close Encounters marked the beginning of his decline as an artist, and, some argue, of American cinema.
With this film, Spielberg had his own close encounter with photographic special effects. They kidnapped him, carrying him off to a distant galaxy where he was subjected to mind-altering experiments. He returned to earth with the conviction that anything was possible on film. Under his influence, chance began to disappear from Hollywood movies. For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick worked for months with cameraman John Alcott, developing a method of shooting by candlelight to reproduce the mood of eighteenth-century drawing rooms. Soon, however, film-makers found it easier to tweak the image optically to achieve such effects. The serendipity Truffaut celebrated in Day for Night, where a hotel vase could be substituted for a prop one or, in an extreme case, a script reconstructed when one of the stars died, also ceased to be matters of account for Hollywood. By 1994, when, in a similar case to Day for Night’s fiction, Brandon Lee died in an accident on the futuristic kung fu thriller The Crow when a prop pistol malfunctioned, director Alex Proyas could continue shooting with doubles and Lee’s image with a new face ‘morphed’ in. Not only did nobody notice, but the film was a hit. Michael Crichton had already foreshadowed the possible wholesale replacement of performers with video simulations or computer animation. Spielberg, impatient with actors and devoted to the total control offered by animation, became the pioneer in putting Crichton’s forecast into effect. Under his influence, all Hollywood film began to aspire to the condition of cartoon. It’s no coincidence that its most skilful combinations of computer-generated images and live action, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump, should have been made by Robert Zemeckis, his most faithful protégé.
In 1979, New Yorker television critic Michael J. Arlen became one of the first writers to articulate the growing disquiet with this trend. He spoke of ‘the tyranny of the visual’ – the growing preference, especially on TV, for graphic over verbal story-telling, the tendency to avoid difficult subjects, or, having reluctantly addressed them, to glamorise even the most squalid historical eras with a Hallmark Greeting Card/Classics Comics approach, shooting hovels in soft-focus and giving rags a touch of haute couture style. (It was a trend of which, ironically, even Spielberg would be a victim when the Academy gave its 1982 Costumes Oscar to the dhotis and loincloths of Gandhi.)
Spielberg instigated this change in Hollywood, but he had plenty of equivalents in other arts, particularly musical superstars like Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with all of whom, significantly, he would pursue his ambition to make a giant musical. Spielberg had much in common, artistically, with these stars. An evaluation of Streisand by jazz critic Whitney Balliett could apply equally to Spielberg: ‘The songs she sings are of small matter now… They are all part of a steadily unfurling carpet of sound… What she does so ingeniously is Streisand each song… She smoothes the melodic hills, raises the valleys, equalises the emotions, and encases the lyrics in a kind of silken sheen.’ It insults Spielberg’s intelligence to believe he didn’t recognise this tendency in himself, nor the criticism it attracted. Yet he acquiesced. Only someone with Martin Scorsese’s rigorous self-doubt would not have, which was why Spielberg respected him so much. Even as he admired Raging Bull, however, Spielberg knew he didn’t dare make such a film at that time. But he believed that he was capable of doing so, and retained enough perspective to see that, eventually, he must try, if he was to live with himself.
For many directors even younger than himself, Spielberg was now a touchstone and role model. They were eager to work with – or for – him. So confident were Universal of his judgement that they offered to fund any project he recommended, no matter how untried the talent. Even Variety, not easily startled, couldn’t keep the surprise out of its report on Universal’s proposal. ‘It may be the newest kind of completion bond,’ it wrote on 30 November 1977. ‘And it’s more bankable than an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London.’
The first beneficiaries were Zemeckis and Gale. Their script ‘Beatlemania’ followed a group of New Jersey teenagers desperate to see their idols on Ed Sullivan’s New York TV show in February 1964. Milius’s executive producers on Big Wednesday, Tamara Assayev and Alexandra Rose, had taken it to Warners, who were interested, if only for the potential soundtrack album which might rival American Graffiti’s best-selling compilation of fifties rock. There was no enthusiasm, however, for Zemeckis as a director.
Spielberg recommended the project to Verna Fields at Universal. She passed it to Ned Tanen, who invested $2.6 million in the retitled I Wanna Hold Your Hand, ‘on the assurance,’ reported an awed Variety, ‘that Zemeckis could handle the project, that Spielberg would serve as executive producer on the project and that if his judgement proved wrong he’d step in and direct the film himself.’ In the event, Spielberg did little on the film. He said later that his only advice to Zemeckis was, ‘Wear comfortable shoes.’
With some modifications, the Universal deal would be that with which Spielberg would metamorphose from director to producer, and on which he would base the success of Amblin Entertainment. Charitable commentators put his generosity down to memories of the years he’d spent trying to find someone to back his first feature. Undoubtedly this came into it. But there were more potent forces at work, in particular his fear of losing control of his world. Spielberg had begun to turn into what he’d always wished to become, a one-man studio.
Working with a cast of unknowns, except for De Palma’s wife and star Nancy Allen, Zemeckis finished I Wanna Hold Your Hand without incident and under budget early in 1978. Spielberg brought in his Duel editor Frank Morriss to cut it. It opened in April to mostly kind reviews, but the under-eighteens, in their cradles when The Beatles were at their peak, didn’t come to see it. It lost more money than any Universal film in the previous three years, a failure which should have warned Spielberg that teenagers preferred stories set in contemporary America or the mythic past and future.
In February 1978, in Copenhagen as part of a European trip to promote Close Encounters, Spielberg, asked about his plans, announced he would make the low-budget ‘Growing Up’ for Universal, scripted by Zemeckis and Gale from his own story, with shooting beginning in Arizona in March. The modest film would, he said, deal mainly with the things that absorbed modern kids, in particular TV. He wanted to show them acting out the plots of popular series like Charlie’s Angels, as he had acted out Hollywood movies of the fifties. But ‘Growing Up’ would never be made. Instead he became sidetracked by the project originally due to follow it, the big-budget comedy 1941, to be produced jointly by Columbia and Universal. Twenty people, he told the Danish press, were already creating the storyboards.
The coalition between studios was a new idea born of soaring budgets. In 1974, Warners and Universal, both having bought novels about a skyscraper fire, sensibly pooled their resources and made just one film, The Towering Inferno. Universal were nervous about backing 1941, the budget of which was already topping $9 million, but nobody wanted to cut loose their single most profitable film-maker. Milius took the film to Columbia, which had similar reservations. A compromise was reached. Columbia would release it in the US and Universal throughout the rest of the world. Alan Hirschfield announced 1941 to the Columbia board as ‘a broad farce, special-effects comedy in the genre of Mad, Mad World, and [it] could be an enormous picture’. John Milius would both write and produce, he said.
To bolster their resolve, Spielberg reassured the board, with a chutzpah even David Begelman might have envied, ‘I will not make this film if it goes over $10 million.’ His statement carried conviction. Close Encounters was bulldozing box-office records around the world. In three weeks in the US alone, it grossed $72 million. In London, it was chosen as the Royal Command Performance film. Spielberg and Amy, flanked by the security guards that were now a fixture of their life, came to London with the Hirschfields, Dreyfuss, Trumbull, Williams, Truffaut and Cary Guffey to shake hands with the Queen. Julia Phillips cancelled at the last minute. David Begelman also dropped out when the Palace discreetly removed him from the list.
A few days later, Spielberg stepped on stage at London’s National Film Theatre to inaugurate a season of his films. On the drive there, he confided to NFT programmer Adrian Turner that he’d spent the day with Stanley Kubrick, who was preparing The Shining at Elstree. ‘It’s the main reason I came,’ he said. At the NFT, he was greeted with an enthusiasm bordering on adulation. When he said he wouldn’t discuss Close Encounters because it wasn’t in the season, Turner asked who had already seen it in the cinema. Almost the entire audience raised its hands.
Back in LA, Spielberg, took over his new fourteen-room raw wood and fieldstone house at the top of Coldwater Canyon, with Amy as live-in companion. Newsweek patronisingly dismissed the house as ‘a combination home and penny arcade that’s filled with pool tables, pinball machines, computer games and other devices to delight the heart of a gadget freak’. He also rented a beach house at Malibu for weekends, installing a cutting room with a Steenbeck editing table. He and Irving were one of Hollywood’s most visible and apparently contented couples. Instead of De Palma and Milius dropping in to talk movies, the guest list expanded to include people with a New York background and a wider cultural interest, among them Rob Reiner, Lisa Eichorn, Penny Marshall and Tim Mathison, though they also invited potential collaborators like John Landis to dinner, a sign that he’d been accepted into the inner circle.
While Spielberg worked on Close Encounters, Amy made Fury for De Palma, playing a psychic with latent powers to destroy, the sort of role for which her quickfire temper made her a natural. Spielberg himself had yet another brush with the supernatural when his grandmother died in a Phoenix nursing home. Spielberg’s mother received the news at 2 a.m. At 5 a.m. the phone rang again, and Leah heard her mother’s voice calling, ‘Help me! He’s coming to get me. He’ll be here any minute. I’m terrified.’ The next day, Leah’s brother, the family tearaway who had joined the circus when Leah was still a girl, arrived at Leah’s house in Los Angeles. Confusingly, LA psychic Thelma Moss connected the dead woman’s son, whom she supposedly feared, with the spectral call. Generally open to the idea of psychic phenomena, Spielberg could make little sense of this and other phantom intimations of life on The Other Side. His confusion would drive him to make Poltergeist in 1981.
The Oscars presented on 29 March 1978 acknowledged both Star Wars and Close Encounters with faint praise. Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture and Lucas for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, Alec Guinness for Best Supporting Actor. It also earned nominations for Best Art Direction, Sound, Editing, Music, Costume Design and Visual Effects. Spielberg was nominated as Best Director for Close Encounters, Melinda Dillon for Best Supporting Actress, with nominations too for Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound, Music, Editing and Visual Effects. Richard Dreyfuss was nominated as Best Actor – not for Close Encounters, however, but for The Goodbye Girl, the Neil Simon comedy he’d done with Herbert Ross while Spielberg was busy shooting the special effects of ‘CE3K’, as the fans were beginning to call it.
For political reasons, Spielberg escorted Julia to the Oscar ceremony, but his thoughts were elsewhere – as was Amy, who had elected to play a deaf-mute dancer in the low-budget Voices for Robert Markowitz, and was on location. Their relationship, after having taken a long time to warm up – ‘Amy and I must have been together for a year and a half before we got to be friends,’ Spielberg said – was now cooling. To her friends, Amy talked about having children, but Spielberg recoiled from such a commitment. She also disliked having her career options curtailed. ‘People who know you,’ she said, meaning Spielberg’s film-making colleagues, ‘don’t think about you as being anybody else.’ It was a common problem with directors’ wives. Friends assumed the wife was the husband’s professional property, and were nervous about auditioning her. If they didn’t hire her, the director might be upset. Of perhaps he’d be more irritated if they did.
When Amy decided to do Voices, she made a point of letting people know she hadn’t asked Spielberg’s advice before she accepted. It was the kind of comment that had Hollywood exchanging glances and raising eyebrows. With it, she presented him with another catch-22. If the film was a hit, it would prove she knew better than he, and could therefore do without him. If it flopped, she would look foolish and, inevitably, would blame Spielberg. Irving learned sign language for Voices, and taught Spielberg a few words, including ‘I love you, Amy.’ During his ritual close-up as the Best Director award was announced, he had agreed to sign this message to her, but lost his nerve and instead mouthed the words silently into the lens.
If Spielberg hoped that Close Encounters would earn him his due from Old Hollywood, the voting proved otherwise. Zsigmond was honoured for his photography, but in every other category where Close Encounters competed with Star Wars, Lucas won. Lucas’s victory was hollow, however, since the key awards all went to Woody Allen for Annie Hall or to Fred Zinnemann’s Julia. Dreyfuss at twenty-nine became the youngest actor to take the Best Actor statuette. Allen, pointedly contemptuous of the Oscars and Hollywood, played clarinet that night at Michael’s Pub in New York, then went home to bed without, he said, knowing or caring that he’d won Best Picture, Best Film and shared the Best Screenplay Oscar as well.
The question asked more than any other while Spielberg toured the world promoting Close Encounters was, ‘Will there be a sequel?’ At the earliest press conferences, he admitted that a script was in preparation for Columbia. The fact didn’t delight him. It was Michael and Julia Phillips, not his own instinct, that had taken him to Columbia, and now it was he, not they, who was stuck there by the studio’s option to make a sequel. Melnick could simply, if he wished, commission Close Encounters 2 and assign it to whomsoever he wanted, as Universal had done with Jaws. To head them off, Spielberg wrote a brief treatment called ‘Night Skies’ that might serve as the basis of the new film.
During the research for Close Encounters, Allen Hynek had described an incident in 1955 when a Kentucky family claimed to have been terrorised by a dozen aliens surrounding their farm. Unlike the playful visitors of Close Encounters, these interlopers were mischievous and occasionally violent. Spielberg imagined the family cowering in their farmhouse as the aliens, unsure of which was the intelligent species, tried to communicate with chickens, rode on cows and, in a reference to a rash of cattle mutilations often credited to aliens, dissected an animal before resolving to cut up a human as well. Eventually a child makes the vital contact that saves the family.
In March 1978 NASA announced that Spielberg had paid $500 to reserve space in the cargo bay of the first Space Shuttle flight, scheduled for 1980. He wanted, they said, to film the earth and moon from orbit for use in the sequel to Close Encounters. Even if he had acquired such footage, however, he would have used it sparingly. ‘Night Skies’ was intended to be intimate, rural. His model was The Twilight Zone, an exemplar he would try repeatedly to replicate in Poltergeist, The Twilight Zone: The Movie, his Amazing Stories series, and in E.T.; creeping out to look for the alien at night in their yard, the teenagers of that movie even imitate the Twilight Zone theme.
Columbia continued to rock with aftershocks of the Begelman scandal. Arguments about whether he should be jettisoned deepened the rift between Ray Stark loyalists and those who backed the board and Hirschfield. In Hollywood, most people felt he must be dismissed, if not as a simple matter of justice, then to reduce the public-relations disaster of his continuing presence inside the company. The accountants in New York, however, argued to keep someone who had proved himself a money-maker. The balance of power shifted significantly when Dan Melnick, now in effective charge of the studio, hired someone to take the job his promotion had left vacant. He chose Frank Price, head of Universal’s TV division, whose prospects there were blocked by Sheinberg and Wasserman. A twenty-year veteran of the corporate wars, Price allied himself with Stark, who would back him on films like The China Syndrome and Kramer versus Kramer that built on the success of Close Encounters. In return, Price approved a treasured Stark project, a film of the musical Annie. The change undermined Hirschfield’s anti-Begelman position, and he was fired in July 1978.
Spielberg, who was essentially pro-Begelman, loathed the new Columbia administration, particularly Price, who’d imported his Universal team and looked set to steer Columbia towards a corporate style geared entirely to maximum marketing, especially on TV. Both Alan Ladd Jr at Fox and Warner Brothers’ production head Terry Semel looked more cordial, more family, and more attuned to his kind of film-making. In particular, Spielberg was impressed with Steve Ross, whose Kinney Services had acquired Warners in 1969. Ross, tall, soft-spoken, silver-haired and diabolically skilful at personal manipulation, was to insinuate himself into Spielberg’s life and career like a suave and tailored forties Hollywood Mephistopheles, changing them forever.
The clamour for a sequel to Close Encounters had modified into a call mainly to know what Neary saw inside the mother ship. If that was all they wanted, Spielberg decided, he could satisfy them and Columbia, and at the same time fine-tune the film, correcting the imbalances imposed by deadlines, second-guessing, bad advice and the hasty post-production caused by the studio’s decision to bring forward the release date. Instead of a new film, he proposed a revised version of the original. At the same time he would continue to work on ‘Night Skies’, to be produced by him but written and directed by some talented newcomers he would choose. Columbia were delighted with the compromise. Billed as the ‘Special Edition’, the new version could be premiered at Cannes in May, giving Close Encounters, in effect, an entire second incarnation for the summer of 1980 without the cost of a new film. They agreed to fund seven weeks of additional shooting, providing the new version included the scene everyone clamoured for: a view inside the mother ship.
While a mother ship interior was built and shot, Spielberg took up the scissors with relish. Out went the Phillipses’ Watergate sub-plot of the USAF hushing up encounters of the first and second kind. In particular he dropped a scene where USAF Major Benchley tries to explain away UFOs to a group of believers. The meeting ends in confusion as a patriarchal Roberts Blossom starts lecturing them on his sighting of Bigfoot.
Dreyfuss’s performance suffered most, since Spielberg knew he’d overplayed the suburban reality of Neary’s life. He cut his visit to the electrical substation during the blackout, as well as a scene that survived from Schrader’s drafts, showing how, looting chickenwire from a neighbour’s yard, Neary builds a huge model of Devil’s Tower, turning his living room, in Schrader’s words, ‘into a kind of Zen garden’. He also restored most of the seven minutes cut after the preview, including the discovery of a cargo ship high and dry in the Gobi Desert. The new film was three minutes shorter, but not, in the estimate of most people, much better. In particular, many felt the spaceship interior resembled the atrium of a particularly gaudy shopping mall.
Norman Levy, Frank Price’s head of marketing, announced that the old version would be ‘retired’, and eight hundred existing prints destroyed, with only the negative and a few archival copies retained. Seething, Spielberg insisted that Levy was misinformed – Variety headlined its report with a hand-rubbing ‘Col “Encounters” Plans News to Steven Spielberg’ – and that both versions would continue to circulate, but Columbia had their way, and soon the Special Edition was the only version generally available. Adding insult to injury, Price drained another $2 million from the project for the studio’s notional contribution. As Julia Phillips commented acidly, this meant that the most successful film in screen history remained, two years after its first release, and with grosses of $77 million in the US alone, technically in the red. Columbia was thus relieved of the necessity to pay the Phillipses their portion of the profit.
A number of events influenced Spielberg’s decision to make 1941 – which, as late as the last day of shooting on Close Encounters, he was still calling ‘The Rising Sun’. One was Annie Hall’s success, which he took as a personal challenge. Early in 1976 he’d told British journalist Barbara Paskin:
I’ve always been a frustrated comedian, a frustrated director of comedy. I’ve wanted to do what Woody Allen’s been doing for a long time now. People laugh when I tell them that. But I really started my career making short joke movies. Movies that were a play on words, that contained visual gags, films that were slightly reminiscent of your Goon Shows and the Monty Python skits. I was very caught up in that and I’d like very much to return and get back into comedy.
Another factor was his growing admiration for John Belushi, whom he adopted as a sort of feckless but good-hearted younger brother. ‘John was to me the opposite of his film image,’ he decided. ‘He was a very tender man looking for love and looking for people to like him and people he could like back… I think John sort of was the messy side of all of us. John represented messy bedrooms all over America.’ He’d enjoyed Belushi’s first film, National Lampoon’s Animal House, directed by John Landis, which came out during the making of Close Encounters. As Bluto, the fraternity’s ultimate party animal, Belushi was Harpo Marx’s Mr Hyde, a goggling, inarticulate Lord of Misrule, addicted to food fights and voyeurism.
Many felt later that the frantic physical comedy of 1941 was Spielberg’s attempt to duplicate Animal House on a grand scale. Surely, he reasoned, the teenage audience he and Belushi shared was ripe for another farce. There was also an element of competition with Landis, whose stock was rising in Hollywood. The two men were natural antagonists, a rivalry that would crystallise a few years later in another disaster, The Twilight Zone: The Movie.
Not long after meeting Belushi in Los Angeles, Spielberg went to New York to discuss his role. The actor took him to his hideaway, a soundproofed vault on Morton Street with a massive sound system. Food scraps and candy-bar wrappers littered the floor. As Spielberg sat down gingerly, Belushi put on a blues album at deafening volume and began haranguing him about his love of rhythm and blues. Spielberg tried to turn the conversation to 1941. He no longer wanted Belushi in the small role as the Japanese sub captain, he said. Instead of an imitation Toshiro Mifune, he could – and did – hire Mifune himself, as well as veteran horror-film actor (and German-speaker) Christopher Lee as a Nazi officer. Belushi was now pencilled in for the more important central role of off-the-wall pilot ‘Wild Bill’ Kelso, who rampages across the west after phantom squadrons of Zeros before crashing spectacularly on Hollywood Boulevard, the set for which was even then being built at Burbank.
Spielberg later slighted the screenplay of 1941 as about as tasteful as Mad magazine, but initially he loved its yammering energy. Though they had already written their script for the more focused Back to the Future, Zemeckis and Gale at the time were preoccupied with mechanistic stories involving a multitude of characters and coincidences, all building towards a vigorous action climax. 1941 was characteristic. Set on 13 December 1941, it covers Kelso’s wild flight, his night-time landing in the camp of Colonel ‘Mad Man’ Maddox (Warren Oates), and his eventual crash. The sole voice of reason, Californian coastal defence commander General Stilwell (Robert Stack, in a role originally offered to John Wayne, who patriotically refused when he heard that two American aircraft crashed in the film), minimises the Japanese threat while trying to relax watching Dumbo in a Hollywood Boulevard cinema.
Meanwhile, in parallel stories, a riot is building between enlisted men led by Sitarski (Treat Williams) and zoot-suited locals at a nearby dance, USAF Captain Birkhead (Tim Mathison) is trying to seduce Stillwell’s secretary Donna (Nancy Allen), who is sexually aroused by aircraft, a Japanese submarine with a Nazi officer on board is cruising off Santa Monica, and the house-proud Douglases (Ned Beatty and Lorraine Gary) are appalled when artillery is sited in their Santa Monica garden. The stories coalesce in a violent final two reels which combine a jitterbug contest and riot, and the destruction of the Douglas house and the nearby amusement park, at the conclusion of which a ferris wheel rolls down the pier and into the Pacific.
Belushi was delighted with the story, but wouldn’t be rushed on his performance.
‘We’ll work it out on the set,’ he assured Spielberg. ‘I’m best there. I’m fast. I like to improvise. I won’t let you down.’
When Spielberg, his ears ringing, left Morton Street, Belushi thanked him for offering the part. Unaccustomed to gratitude from actors, Spielberg was further disarmed. The actor’s enthusiasm helped soften the blow when Belushi’s agent, Bernie Brillstein, told him his price had risen to $350,000. This was more than Dreyfuss had got for Close Encounters, but Spielberg swallowed and paid it.
At their next meeting in Hollywood, Belushi offhandedly introduced Dan Aykroyd to Spielberg as Sergeant Tree, the gung-ho tank commander who spouts patriotic speeches straight out of John Wayne movies and installs an artillery piece on a Pacific headland to blast the passing Japanese sub and Ned Beatty’s house as well. Aykroyd, a better actor than Belushi and, above all, more controlled, slipped into character and reeled off reams of statistics about tanks and artillery. Spielberg promptly cast him. Not only was he a natural for movies; he would also keep Belushi under control and, hopefully, away from drugs.
In hiring ex-Saturday Night Live comics like Aykroyd and Mathison, Spielberg also believed he was buying insurance. Even if the film wasn’t funny, the performers were sure to be. Brillstein wasn’t so sure. He’d read the script and found it flat. He also worried about letting his client loose in Los Angeles, a supermarket of narcotics which the insecure and self-destroying Belushi would be unable to resist. But the actor ignored Brillstein’s warnings about the writing and the director’s lack of comedy experience. Belushi had been dazzled by Close Encounters, whose ideas he embraced with almost religious fervour. There was also a growing perception that the director had the Midas touch. Being cast in 1941 affirmed Belushi’s stardom. ‘I can’t turn down Spielberg,’ he told Brillstein.
While 1941 lurched towards its troubled birth, Spielberg dealt with other unfinished business. MGM finally sold him the rights to A Guy Named Joe. A succession of screenwriters started work on adapting it. Still feeling Dreyfuss was too young for the self-sacrificing pilot, Spielberg raised the project with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Both were interested, but both wanted to play Joe. Nor did any leading lady come to mind. Later, he confessed his real reason for shelving the project: ‘I wasn’t mature enough emotionally then.’
In July, Dennis Stanfill fired Alan Ladd Jr from Fox. Ladd and his team set about forming a new group, The Ladd Company, but for the moment a potential haven was closed to Spielberg. Coppola had meanwhile conceived another off-the-wall money-making scheme, this time to buy up strip clubs and topless bars in San Francisco’s sleazy Broadway district and turn them into smart nightclubs and theatres. Spielberg agreed to be one of the backers, along with rock impresario Bill Graham.
With Lucas, Spielberg also hammered out details of their joint production of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Both were tentative about complicating an eleven-year friendship with a business relationship, especially one as volatile as that between producer and director, though Spielberg more so. People were watching, and quite a few of them, including some friends, wouldn’t be sorry to see them fall out. ‘This movie,’ acknowledged Spielberg, ‘is the proving ground of whether we – not just George and me, but all our friends – can continue to make movies together without feeling envious or competitive or resentful.’
To make sure, right from the start, that nobody muddied the water, they jettisoned middlemen. Without agents, they wrote out their deal on the lined paper of a school exercise book. Late in October, Lucas’s long-time lawyer Tom Pollock, who shared their no-suit-no-tie style, handed it to every studio simultaneously. It was a technique he’d pioneered in the early seventies, when, representing Barwood and Robbins, he submitted scripts like The Bingo Long Travelling All Stars and Motor Kings to a dozen companies at once.
Details of the proposal leaked almost immediately to columnist Liz Smith. ‘Hollywood will practically explode,’ she wrote, ‘and every executive suite in the cinema world may have to be redecorated after the screaming, scratching, clawing tantrums and furniture-throwing that will accompany [its] exposure.’
As foretold, the Suits took as a gigantic insult the suggestion that they pay $20 million to make the film, including $1.5 million to Spielberg and $4 million to Lucas, as well as bearing almost all the costs of distribution and agreeing to pay Lucas’s and Spielberg’s share out of the first dollar earned. Some said $20 million was too little to make the film: the opening scene alone, of Indy invading a booby-trapped Inca temple, spluttered one, would cost at least $50 million. Nobody believed the film would be finished in eighty-five days, as promised. Spielberg had gone over time and budget on Jaws; what guarantee that he wouldn’t do so again?
Nor were they enthusiastic about homages to serials, pulps and comics. TV’s Batman had run from 1966 to 1968, but features based on the Doc Savage stories and Flash Gordon had flopped. Lucas explained that these knowing parodies were played for ‘camp’. ‘The secret [of Raiders’ success] is, of course,’ wrote British critic John Brosnan, ‘that Spielberg and Lucas have an unashamedly personal involvement in the material, and their obvious enjoyment of putting it on the screen is communicated to the audience.’
The furore was nowhere greater than at Universal, where Wasserman and Sheinberg had a series of anguished meetings to consider the project. ‘Lew and Sid,’ said one insider, ‘it drove them crazy. As far as they were concerned, that deal was asking for unheard-of pieces of profit, and ownership. And they passed on it, because it was something that went beyond their definition of how things should be.’ Indignation blinded them to a deal which one of the wiser executives called ‘almost as innovative and implicit with change as the advent of sound’. Even Disney rejected the project out of hand.
The reaction dramatised the contrasting management philosophies of Old Hollywood and New. ‘The most important thing to remember about a deal, and about negotiation,’ wrote producer Dawn Steel, articulating the studio line, ‘is that it is all about appetite. It’s not the details or the complications of a deal that matter, it’s how much you want it, and how much you’re willing to spend for it… Deal-making is… about putting a price on your appetite and then sticking to it.’ But Spielberg and Lucas were ascetics. They had no appetites as the lawyers and accountants understood them. The Lear Jet, the yacht, the Bel Air mansion and the recognition of every head waiter in town meant nothing to them. Julia Phillips complained testily of Spielberg, ‘I taught the little prick he deserved limos before he even knew what it was like to travel in a first-class seat on a plane.’
If one pressed Lucas, Milius and Spielberg to define their needs, almost all would reply that they wanted to keep enjoying the things that got them through adolescence: comic books, TV, movies and their gang. Adolescents at heart, they craved games to play, candy and hamburgers to eat, old cars to ride around in, friends with whom to hang out and a place to do it. Big agents and studio heads ate at Ma Maison, George Lucas at Hamburger Hamlet. Most of all, as Scott Fitzgerald had said of all men, they wanted to be famous and to be loved.
Only Michael Eisner, quietly-spoken, dark-suited head of production at Paramount (and later of Disney), saw that the Raiders deal, once one got over the shock of its unconventional terms, was a worthwhile risk. Even if it needed to gross $60 million before the studio saw a profit, the track records of Lucas and Spielberg almost guaranteed that any such profit would be enormous. ‘We’re supposed to be creative people,’ Eisner told Pollock. ‘So let’s make a creative deal.’
Eisner left the details to his head of business affairs, Dick Zimbert, a bean-counter whose ability to put more beans in Paramount’s basket than those of its clients was legendary. Zimbert invented the ‘rolling break’. Directors, writers and stars only began earning money on their ‘points’ when the film broke even, but under Zimbert’s formulae, this horizon, delayed, sometimes indefinitely, by bank interest and the costs of marketing, distribution and new prints, receded as fast as the film approached it. Zimbert’s expertise dazzled almost everyone. ‘Most of the people who were negotiating rolling break-even,’ wrote Dawn Steel, then a junior producer at Paramount, ‘had no idea what it meant.’
With Zimbert’s guidance, Eisner coaxed Lucas and Spielberg into shouldering some market costs, part of the loan interest, and paying the studio a small fee for distributing the film. He also improved Paramount’s share of the rental income, from 40 to 50 per cent. Nor was the deal without guarantees. ‘We built in some serious penalties if they went over,’ says Eisner, ‘and they agreed without hesitation. I figured either they don’t care or they’ve got this thing figured out.’ Assuming the latter, Eisner also wrote in provision for a minimum of four sequels.
Just to check his reasoning, Eisner ran the deal past his CEO, Charles Weber, who in turn asked the opinion of his friend, the entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, who had backed the hits Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Stigwood urged him to go for it – and, backing his judgement, negotiated a private deal with Lucasfilm for future projects.
In December 1978, Eisner signed, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for better or worse, was set as Spielberg’s next film after 1941. New Hollywood had supplanted the old with scarcely a murmur. The sandcastle meeting assumed superstitious significance for Spielberg. It became his practice to leave the US on the eve of opening a new film and spend the week of its release in Hawaii.
In retrospect, 1978 was not the year for 1941. Vietnam had become the national embarrassment, and the public, after refusing for a decade to look at any film on the subject except John Wayne’s The Green Berets, was embracing it with masochistic fervour – just as Wayne, coincidentally, had open-heart surgery. In the Philippines, Coppola was winding up an epic shoot on Apocalypse Now. Already on screen, Jane Fonda in Coming Home was having sex with paraplegic veteran Jon Voight. The Deer Hunter, the Schindler’s List of its day, 182 minutes of relentless delving into the moral morass of Vietnam, with a leitmotif of Russian roulette that paralleled this most agonising of self-inflicted national wounds, was a hit. Grown men broke down during screenings, gloated director Michael Cimino, and retreated, sobbing, to the toilets, leaning on their buddies’ arms. An urge for films about abasement and humiliation swept Hollywood. In Midnight Express, Brad Davis, a nice American boy arrested for drug smuggling, was brutalised in a Turkish prison. Woody Allen decided he was ready to go mano a mano against Ingmar Bergman and made Interiors, his first drama – and first flop. Sackcloth and ashes were à la mode. Crow was served at all the best restaurants, with humble pie to follow.
Against this current of angst, Spielberg swam stubbornly towards farce. As if in reaction, he oversold 1941, pushing its multiple stars, the variety of incident, the wealth of influences. In August 1978 he’d assured Variety, somewhat incoherently, that he was making an ‘action misadventure… with a chock full of nuts’. Chuck Jones was retained as visual consultant, and Spielberg told a London audience that he hoped 1941 would resemble a Road Runner cartoon. He suggested similarities to Norman Jewison’s The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, a low-budget 1966 comedy about a Soviet submarine stranded off the eastern United States. It would also have the feeling of Laurel and Hardy, he said. And Hellzapoppin. And Mack Sennett, and the Three Stooges.
The film even opened with a quotation, this time from Spielberg himself. Susan Backlinie, the nude bather devoured at the opening of Jaws, was called back for another swim, interrupted this time by Mifune’s surfacing submarine. But it was the parallels with childhood favourites that Spielberg relished. The film has homages to Doctor Strangelove, and to The Quiet Man: its brawl takes place to Victor Young’s sprightly reel that accompanies the battle between Wayne and Victor McLaglen in John Ford’s classic. But it was the parallels with Stanley Kramer’s 1963 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World he pursued most energetically. There were multiple similarities, not only in the pie- and cake-fights, brawls, buildings being blown up, planes and cars crashing and human victims caught in elaborate traps, like a collapsing fire escape, but in its characters. Kramer had cast his old friend Spencer Tracy as C.G. Culpepper, the only man to keep his head in the frantic pursuit of the fortune hidden by dying criminal Jimmy Durante. Robert Stack has a similar role in 1941. Spielberg’s aircraft scenes with Tim Mathison and Nancy Allen recall Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney trying to fly a plane in Kramer’s film, and being talked down by Paul Ford, while Ned Beatty and Lorraine Gary are the Milton Berle and Ethel Merman of Mad World writ small. Kramer had wanted to make ‘the comedy to end all comedies’. Instead Mad World showed that enormous resources were less important than a sense of humour – a lesson Spielberg was now to learn.
Spielberg approached the film with his customary innovative flair. He told William Fraker, who lit 1941, that he wanted a less gaudy, over-illuminated look than the typical Hollywood farce, so the cameraman shot almost everything, including Greg Jein’s miniatures of Santa Monica’s Ocean Park amusement park and pier, in smoke or through fog filters. In a reverse of Spielberg’s usual method, the miniatures and effects work were shot first, and the actors integrated later. It was an early and ominous indication that people mattered less than the gags.
During his European promotion tours of 1978 Spielberg discovered the new Louma crane system, which put a lightweight camera at the end of an extendable fifteen-foot boom and allowed it to glide across a set without the use of a massive dolly. It became the film’s primary camera, perfectly suited to shoot the brawl between Army boys and zoot-suiters, for which he hired the Burbank Studios, with the largest stages in Hollywood. Scenes with the eighty-foot submarine would be filmed in MGM’S giant tank, where he’d shot parts of Jaws.
Belushi arrived in Los Angeles in October 1978, and Spielberg took him to the hangar where Hollywood Boulevard had been recreated. The comedian was awed. This was nothing like the poky sets of Saturday Night Live.
‘Gee, you’re making a real Hollywood movie,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Spielberg said proudly. ‘We build it up, then we destroy it.’
Shooting went on through November in the same miasma of self-congratulation. The stages, unlike those in Mobile, were cool and comfortable. Everyone enjoyed the jokes: the mood on the set was of genuine hilarity. Inspired, Spielberg increasingly abandoned his story boards and improvised new gags. The finale in particular developed into an intricate interlocking set of actions, each triggering the next, like one of the Rube Goldberg contraptions which Spielberg admired and wrote into films like 1985’s The Goonies.
Kramer had filled Mad World with cameos for famous comedians like Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges. 1941 might have benefited from the same idea, but the distinguished bit-players with whom Spielberg scattered the film were, with the exception of Slim Pickens, mostly dramatic actors, like Lionel Stander and Elisha Cook Jr. John Landis appears. So, though he was more a hero for Milius than Spielberg, does veteran director Sam Fuller. He also found a role for Eddie Deezen, a long-faced, big-eared actor with a voice like fingernails on a blackboard whom he’d noticed in I Wanna Hold Your Hand and recognised as a lookalike of his adolescent self. Deezen has the thankless role, shared with a dummy, of the coastwatcher perched on the ferris wheel which ends up in the Pacific.
Belushi was difficult. The actor came on the set with only a notional grasp of his lines, and worked his way into the part. Even the simplest scene demanded six or seven takes. At Spielberg’s request, Aykroyd nursemaided him off the set, hiding, out of loyalty, the real reason for his erratic behaviour: the hourly snort of cocaine, without which Belushi’s attention and energy wavered. At night, Belushi partied with other cokeheads among the cast and crew; one member of the unit counted twenty-five regular users. Treat Williams, who played Sitarski, accompanied Belushi on his nocturnal excursions from bar to club to ‘connection’, watching in awe as the comic snorted $500 of coke in a single line, then jammed on guitar until dawn. The pace soon began to tell. On 4 December, Belushi arrived late to work, a cardinal sin for Spielberg, who worked at lightning speed and counted every minute. The next day, he still hadn’t arrived an hour after his call. Thirty minutes later, model and actress Lauren Hutton drove onto the lot and delivered a Belushi so stoned he half fell out of her car.
Among the new staff taken onto the payroll for 1941 was Kathleen Kennedy, a thirty-one-year-old producer from San Diego daytime TV who’d accepted a job indexing special-effects shots in order to break into features. She found Spielberg’s office a rat’s nest. ‘I got there and he had written stuff on napkins, on the backs of envelopes, on any piece of scrap paper he could find in the house. I spent that first day and night sorting his ideas out.’ A brilliant organiser and fanatically loyal, Kennedy soon made herself indispensable and was bumped up to Milius’s assistant.
Kennedy accompanied the furious Spielberg to Belushi’s trailer, and found Hutton trying to din the day’s dialogue into his fuddled brain. Seeing Spielberg’s fury, Hutton hurriedly left, and Spielberg raged at Belushi. He was being paid what was, for the director, an enormous sum, and giving nothing for it. Spielberg assigned associate producer Janet Healy to stay with him every minute, making sure he arrived on time and knew his lines.
Spielberg plunged deeper and deeper into a film which, his instinct warned him, wasn’t working. ‘If you’re having this much fun making a movie,’ he told himself, ‘something must be wrong.’ To cover himself, he reshot repeatedly, hoping for better effects. The skidding crash of Belushi’s P-40 along Hollywood Boulevard was done three times, at $1 million a time. He also repeated the elaborate sequence where the ferris wheel rolls down the pier into the Pacific. A joker on the unit printed up T-shirts which reproduced his incautious promise, ‘I will not make this film if it goes over $10 million.’ Each week, a new shirt made its appearance with the old figure crossed out and a higher one substituted. It’s an index to Spielberg’s good humour that the crew wore these openly, and he never complained.
Piling on detail merely made the film more unwieldy. Spielberg had missed the lesson of Animal House, which, for all its food-fights and sight gags, hinged on slapstick, not hardware. 1941 also lacked a pretext for its action, Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’, which, be it ever so trivial, the characters were looking for, and which focused the narrative. Spielberg ended shooting with the ominous conviction that he’d made a dud. At the wrap party, everyone got a facsimile combat ribbon – ‘The point of which,’ said Jeff Walker, who later marketed the ribbon and a 1941 baseball cap to a largely indifferent market, ‘was, “I survived 1941.”’ On 9 December, Spielberg told the New York Times, ‘I’ll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie.’ The man who’d so skilfully estimated the taste of his audience on other occasions would turn out to be right again.